Najib’s audit of 1MDB scandal a no-hoper

By admin-s On Mar 16, 2015

(FMT) – The same person being both Prime Minister and Finance Minister indicates the extent to which checks-and-balances – inherent in a Federation – had been eroded.

Malaysia’s past, degenerating from a Federation into a unitary state where the premiership has virtually become a dictatorship, has caught up with it in the present to haunt its future. It’s a recipe for disaster and that’s what happened: the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (MDB) is a national disaster of epic proportions.

One person presided over the Ministry of Finance-owned 1MDB, touted as a strategic investment company, and the scandal.

The bottomline is that not much hope can be placed on the audit that Prime Minister and Finance Minister Najib Abdul Razak has ordered on 1MDB.

The consensus is that it’s the normal response of a government seeking to drag out things into inaction and hoping that ultimately everything would be forgotten and that it can be business as usual. “That – forgetting the scandal — must not be allowed to happen,” advised the Sarawak Report (SR) Editor, Clare Rewcastle-Brown, who started out going after Sarawak Governor Taib Mahmud when he was Chief Minister.

Power, or the lack of it, was the thrust of a public forum on Sunday which explored the 1MDB scandal. It was not so much about what happened, the forum learnt at the Crystal Crown Hotel, 1MDB: The ultimate LOW Down, but rather why the scandal happened.

Rewcastle, who spoke to the forum via Skype from London, pointed out that there was over-concentration of power in Malaysia to the extent that the same person was Prime Minister and Finance Minister. SR is a UK-based whistleblower website which unearthed the illegal money trail at 1MDB.

“The same person being both Prime Minister and Finance Minister indicates the extent to which checks-and-balances – inherent in a Federation – had been eroded,” said the Sarawak-born Rewcastle who is a sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

She was echoing the common concern of Malaysians, across both sides of the South China Sea, since from even before Mahathir Mohamad introduced the Prime Minister-cum-Finance Minister system in the wake of the Asian Currency Crisis in 1997/98.

The over-concentration of power, agreed Rewcastle, allowed Penangite Jho Low to not only siphon out monies from 1MDB, it prevented more information from being made public. “He’s just a thirty-something businessman. In a more open system, it would have not happened, and if it did, he would have been flushed out and put in place a long time ago.”